Difficulty levels of most European languages for Americans
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
One part of this is the assumption that Americans have some/any familiarity with the language, and that is simply wrong. We are simply not exposed to the German language at all, for obvious reasons.
Tangent >> it's also funny how Austria is coded as a Category 3 language while Germany is Category 2 :o
Honestly, I'm not surprised. German Austrian dialects are quite strong, omnipresent and difficult to learn (few resources apart from going in the streets).
That’s almost certainly the error of the person who colored the map.
Maybe they’re thinking of Alemannisch, but I don’t think that’s cat 3 either.
Well, Austrians, much to their national pride, don't really speak German, but they have their own localized dialect forks of it which are more difficult to understand for foreigners who only learned "vanilla" German, so the map is correct in this regard.
It's why Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't allowed to dub his own American movies to German, but the studios got a German actor to voice him since his Styrian dialect was considered too strong for most German speakers.
Similar with Swiss German.
No matter how well you think you know German, you'll always run into a dialect you won't understand.
Especially at the border you can have German pupils to attend schools in Austria and vice versa and none of them needs a special class for learning the other German language
Sure but that's only useful for writing, and quickly becomes irelevant in speaking when you can't understand the dialect because every word is pronounced differently than what you know. Two languages can share the same grammar rules yet be completely different from one another becasue the words themselves are different.
>Especially at the border
That's a very silly argument. Firstly, border regions between countries often share dialect similarities because d'uh, geographical proximity. A virtual line in the dirt doesn't mean two people will suddenly speak vastly different when they've evolved together for centuries only separated by a few km.
And secondly, they're both native German speakers, of course they don't need translators between each others, but that wasn't my point. My point was specifically that foreigners who learn "vanilla" German might end up needing translators when they hear some of those Austrian dialects(maybe Bavarian too, IDK).
With respect to that map though it doesn't matter because someone learning German for traveling to Germany and someone learning German for traveling to Austria will learn the same language, so it doesn't make sense to color it differently.
The dialect is something you acquire while being embedded in the region after you already know German
It totally does, because the "vanilla" German you learn back home in the US will be less useful to you in Austria due to the difficult dialects, than it will be in Germany where you'll have an easier time.
Signed, someone who learned German before moving to Austria. drops_mic.gif
Funny that they were worried about Schwarzenegger speaking German with a strong accent, given that he speaks English with such a strong accent, and they allowed that to be in the movies.
Everybody else speaking English, means they can communicate with you, if they want to.
It doesn't mean you can follow along with conversation at a party or social event or work environment. You will often be left out of the loop, even if not intentionally.
It doesn’t seem like a very useful ranking, at least for the smaller national languages.
Japanese was easier. German too. Spanish was much easier.
Russian/Ukrainian: [1]
Greek: [2]
Chinese: [3]
Learning Cyrillic or Greek or Asian phonetic scripts like Katakana or Hangul is not that difficult since they are conceptually similar to Latin script. Learning ideographic scripts like those used in China or Japan (Kanji) is another story.
[1] https://www.mrmrsvintagetypewriters.com/cdn/shop/files/DSC_3...
[2] https://www.mrmrsvintagetypewriters.com/cdn/shop/products/DS...
[3] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/Ch...
English shares a lot of vocabulary with French, so that's a lot less for English speakers to learn.
You want eat what?
I'm hungry very.
You go no?
etc. I had an easier time learning that than German for example.
The main difficulty with learning German is that you tend to get replies in immaculate English
- Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian, Romanian - 24 weeks
- French, Spanish - 30 weeks
Three things made it difficult, as I remember: one, it is agglutinative, so you get strings of suffixes on the ends of nouns, verbs, etc.; two, it has zero overlap with English vocabulary, or even the Romantic & Germanic ancestors of English; three, vowel harmonizing takes a bit of practice. None of these is particularly demanding, but they have no equivalents in English.
But a very aesthetically satisfying language once you get the hang of it.
The stats is probably mainly a vague map of mother tongue languages of the employees. It probably does not take many to shift the stats a lot.
Also, like the article mentions, English has just as many words with Latin roots as it does Germanic.
Genealogically closer languages are not always easier to learn. I don't think anyone would say that, for example, Icelandic should be easier for an English speaker than is Spanish or French.
Maybe it's because elision is so common in French? e.g. "j’aime l’hiver". I find it hard to decouple those things quickly enough in my head. Most words in German, on the other hand, are spelled exactly as they are pronounced.
Curious if folks have had other experiences with these two languages.
Oddly, French people understood my French much easier than Germans understood my German. My guess was that I nailed the French grammar but struggled more with the German grammar.
Mot is mo
Phrase is fraz
Maison is mezo (almost)
It would actually be interesting to compute that, possibly by kind of words (verbs, nouns, ...) and prominence.
I do find Spanish to have been much easier to develop an ear for than French (I’ve put in far less effort, but can differentiate words about as well) and also for whatever reason I found gaining a sense for noun gender to be extremely easy for Spanish but nearly impossible for French. I can guess and be right the vast majority of the time in Spanish, while in French it often feels like I’m doing worse than 50/50. It doesn’t help that it can be challenging to practice it in isolation, due to how articles work in French. Only way to drill gender effectively is in context, hard to quickly build, say, an Anki deck for it.